Friday, August 24, 2007

Strelley Telly Time #4: The Hitman And Her In Ritzeh's

If you’ve ever cocked a sneer at Oceana, or are labouring under the delusion that the 80s were a golden era where everyone looked like robots in pirate costumes, you need to invest half an hour of your time in the following. This is YouTube gold.

A quick history lesson for the yout’ dem; before acting the twat on the X-Factor, and whilst in the middle of his reign as purveyor of synthetic pop-shite in the late ‘80s, Pete Waterman presented The Hitman and Her, a magnificent hunk of tat broadcast live-ish from Zanadu’s in Chesterfield or somesuch that went out on ITV early on Saturday morning, usually when you came back from a proper club and you needed cheering up when you hadn’t pulled or couldn’t get into Rock City.

The great thing about Hitman was that if afforded you the opportunity to rip the piss out of Gary and Sharon as they went about their mating ritual without running the risk of getting your head stoved in, whilst conveniently forgetting that they were happily swinging their chinos in a club while you were at your mate’s house picking at a kebab with the sound down so not to wake his Dad, who was on the post in the morning. The following clips are from the night they came to Ritzy’s – sorry, Ritzeh’s ­– in 1989.

While you're checking these clips - and if you're the same age as me, you'll be scouring them with a magnifying glass to see if you recognise anyone - look out for the following;

1) Pete Waterman relentlessly hyping his latest slab of pop- mank

2) The dance troupe led by Wiggy, a lad who usually wore a blonde wig and some kind of skimpy nappy (fact: my mate was actually approached by Wiggy and offered a slot as YTS Wiggy. He turned it down)

3) Lads wearing ties. Yes, even as late as 1989, looking like you worked in IT on Dress-Down Friday was still a mandatory look at meat markets. If you went past Zhivago’s on a Friday night (it’s now Vision Express in Viccy Centre, kids), you would see blokes going through the bins trying to find a scrap of cloth that they would fashion into a tie

4)Ritzy, although looking like the set of a Albanian version of Dr Who, winning the Discotheque Of The Year (North And Midlands) award. Which must have really fucked The Hacienda off.

5) Oh, and bear in mind that just down the road, The Garage is probably playing Voodoo Ray and Me, Myself And I, Rock City is playing Orange Crush, Love Shack (when it was a new release, and not a club night), and Keep On Moving upstairs and She Bangs The Drums downstairs, and loads of Nottinghamians are in a field somewhere,what with Acid Culture already starting a year ago.

Fact: Pete Waterman believes that the best single Motown ever produced was this.